Internet users’ legal and technical perspectives on digital legacy management for post-mortem interaction

Abstract

Digital assets are produced in large scale by technology users, especially after the advent of the Internet. This paper aims to analyze Brazilian users’ experience with Google Inactive Accounts, under technical, legal and cultural perspectives. Regarding legal aspects, Brazilian laws are still inceptive. Some projects are being designed or analyzed by governmental institutions, and the right to oblivion is one of the main controversial points. The experiment was part of an exploratory research by means of questionnaires, which were answered by web software engineers, who are users of that application too. The answers were organized into four main categories: (a) inheritance rights; (b) the Right to be Forgotten; (c) temporal contact information; and (d) technical stalemates. All those data were analyzed according to a literature review on technical and legal issues regarding death, legacy and technology, so as to better understand the advantages and disadvantages of the options provided by Google Inactive Accounts.